Kathy Andersen is a Business Analyst and Quality Analyst for Aviture in Omaha. She also works with Decision Logic, a restaurant management software company based in Lincoln, Nebraska. She will be giving a presentation, “Something’s Rotten in the State of Quality,” at this year’s Heartland Developers Conference (Sept. 7-9) with her co-presenter Nicholas Tuck, Software Gardener at Aviture. SPN caught up with Andersen over the phone.
SPN: What inspired you to give a talk on Quality?
KA: In my past work history I worked with a QA manager. This person fell on the side of “Quality Control” and measures that purport to be quality measures. But it really was just checking boxes, not pushing forward, testing or having a whole-team creative approach.
This person was very acidic and destructive to every project they were on. I saw this happening, and it inspired me to think a lot about what quality means, what value means to a piece of software.
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My partner in this was Nicolas Tuck, who is giving the talk with me. We’ve had many conversations about quality. We’ve dug into the past research, looking at Edward Deming, the father of Total Quality Management. He was part of the team that went to Japan and taught Toyota and other industrialists in Japan in the post-World War II era. His work in that became the formative meat, if you will, of the Agile software movement.
SPN: In a lot of industries there’s a tension between quality and production. Do ever see that kind of antagonism in software development?
KA: Yes, definitely. Developers are often very distrustful of QA-labeled team members. QA members are often distrustful of developers and defensive of their work.
That’s why we are giving this talk. We don’t think it should be that way. The whole team should own quality. It’s a different mindset. It’s about the processes you pursue to achieve a quality product. It’s not about checking boxes on quality control measures.
SPN: There’s the old line,”It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.” Do you find a lot of debates about what constitutes a “bug”?
KA: Yes. There’s a measure of subjectivity at any point when you have people collaborating on work. A Story is how many Agile teams manage manage small units of value for customers. Around a Story there’s a lot of argument. [A QA might say,] “I envisioned it was going to work this way, so I’m going to reject it because it doesn’t have x, y and z.” Whereas the person who did the work on the code responds with, “Well, I didn’t know the user wanted to do x, y and z, and I built it with this impression.”
SPN: How do you personally define “quality”?
KA: (laughs) You’ll have to come to the talk! We encourage teams to take a little bit of time, even 15 minutes to sit down and talk about a definition of quality. We present a historical perspective of how the definition of quality has advanced. A lot of it comes down to a “fit for use” application. In order to be fit for use, you have to have some layer of resiliency. You have to have changeability. It can’t be buggy; it has to be optimized to work for the user’s device and internet connection. “Fit for use” is a quick, short phrase that helps sum up the definition of quality.
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